If the government want to go green, they have to go big.

Piecemeal solutions and spendthrift policy is useless.

If the government wants to Build Back Better through a green economic recovery (and they keep saying they do) they need to actually invest the capital and be ambitious.

The £3bn green homes scheme is already falling to bits, because it’s too short, and too minimal for many companies to bother with it. You really want to have a green homes scheme? Extend it, and let the public sector take the lead where private sector won’t, employing people with brand new jobs.

All of the stuff we’ve seen so far has been green washing and rhetoric. To the extent the government has rolled out green initiatives (and any are welcome) they’ve been laughably minimal and have next to no effect. You could pretty safely assume that that’s the strategy: look green, paper over a weak point for the party, and let people feel environmental while voting for you.

There are certainly individuals within the party who’re deadly serious and passionate about tackling climate change, this is the point where they really need to speak up.

Going big with a green industrial revolution type programme is a win win for the government. It’s popular, it’ll deliver tangible benefits and lock them in a coalition of likely voters, and it’ll move this country forward into a future of prosperity, all while offsetting the worst of the building economic meltdown.

The reason they won’t do anything remotely big enough, is because of ideological rigidity. They don’t want an industrial strategy, they don’t want to intervene the course of the market. A four decade old disproven ideology is holding them back from common sense plans that even the business sector could get on board with. They’re more unshakably immovably wedded to the neoliberal model than the CBI for goodness sake.

The Tories are holding Britain back with their outdated and overly cautious ideological approach to green jobs and industry. We deserve better.